


A Shavuot Gift

by ama



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Babies, Baby Names, Canon Jewish Character, Established Relationship, Fluff, Jewish Holidays, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-30
Updated: 2017-05-30
Packaged: 2018-11-06 13:37:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11037273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ama/pseuds/ama
Summary: Joe and Ron spent the beginning of their holiday in a hospital, but neither of them were complaining.





	A Shavuot Gift

**Author's Note:**

> Tonight marks the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Shavuot! It's a holiday that commemorates the giving of the Torah, and also holds special meaning to converts to Judaism, because on the second day of the holiday, the Book of Ruth, which honors a convert to Judaism, is read. I've written a couple of fics in honor of Shavuot because it's an awesome holiday; this particular one came about partly because of that "who in your ship holds things" meme going around tumblr, which made me realize I wanted Liebgott to hold a baby like right now, and partly because, in my headcanon for this particular Liebgott rarepair, Speirs is also a convert to Judaism. References to Jewish culture are scattered throughout the fic. I tried to give them proper context, but there is also an explanation at the bottom of the fic for those unfamiliar. Enjoy!

Seventeen hours of labor. Seventeen hours of waiting, and they were the longest hours of Ron’s life, including the seventeen hours before his first deployment, before his wedding, before _anything_. They spent the last eight of those hours in the hospital, and he figured that together he and Joe had exhausted everything that could be done in a hospital. They had perused the gift shop, made several trips to cafeteria to down gallons of subpar coffee, flipped through every magazine, been subjected to the knowing looks and irritating advice of every nurse and parent in the building, fielded dozens of texts and phone calls and, when all else failed, paced grooves into the floor. More than once Ron almost just walked right into the room to see what was going on, try and be of use, but every time Joe reprimanded him, reminded him that Deb had asked for privacy, and he reluctantly settled back down to wait.

Seventeen hours.

“Do you think—?” he asked, and abruptly stopped. His leg was jiggled. “What if she deci—”

“Shaddup,” Joe said. His head was tipped back against the wall, face towards the ceiling, but his eyes were closed.

“I was just thinking, we haven’t talked about—”

“If my grandmother were here, she’d smack you in the mouth. You’re just asking for the Evil Eye.”

“I thought the Evil Eye was for bragging about good things,” Ron yawned.

“Well, whatever.” Joe paused and answered in a voice that may have been teasing, with its hint of a German accent, if they weren’t so tired and strung out with anticipation. “If, Gott forbid, it happens, we deal with it then. For now, shaddup.”

Two minutes or another half hour may have passed before a nurse entered the waiting room. She scanned the room and hesitated when her gaze landed on Ron and Joe. Immediately, they both stood. Neither of them were huge on PDA, but wordlessly Ron reached out to take Joe’s hand, and they both squeezed hard enough to cut off circulation. She walked towards them.

“Mister…” she consulted her chart. “Speirs and Mr. Liebgott?”

“That’s us,” Joe said in a hoarse voice. He cleared his throat, and the nurse smiled.

“Congratulations—it’s a boy.”

“A boy,” Ron repeated faintly, squeezing Joe’s hand even harder.

“Everything’s looking great, Miss Springer is great; she asked for a bit of privacy, so if you could just wait here for about ten minutes, we’ll give her a little space, we’ll run some routine tests, and then we can take you in to see him.”

They agreed to wait, and the nurse smiled again and left the room. Ron sank back into his chair; his mind was buzzing like crazy.

“Jesus Christ,” Joe said. “A boy.” He sat down, too. “I don’t know why… I mean she was only gonna say one or the other, right, so I don’t know why I’m so friggin…” He ran a hand through his hair. “Oh my god. We actually—we actually have a baby.”

“A son,” Ron corrected. “Oh my god.”

He slung his arm around Joe’s shoulders and pulled him over for a kiss.

“I’ve got to call—should we call somebody?” Joe asked dazedly. “My parents? Your dad? Who do we call first?”

“Not yet,” Ron shook his head. “We talked to everybody already; they’re probably waiting by the car. If we call them now we’re going to get swarmed before we even get to see him.”

“We’re going to get to see him,” Joe repeated in a faint voice.

“Do you need smelling salts?”

“I need a stiff fucking drink,” he said, pushing a hand through his hair. “Do you want to be Dad?” he asked abruptly.

“What are our options?” Ron asked, mostly just to buy himself time because his heart was doing embarrassing giddy things at the thought.

“Dad. Dad-intial. Papa. Abba. Tate.”

“No initials. Too confusing.”

“Yeah.” Joe paused. “I kind of want to be Dad,” he admitted.

“I can be Abba. Holy shit,” he said after a minute, closing his eyes and trying to regulate his breathing. “We have a _kid_.”

“Yeah.”

Joe reached out to take his hand again, and they sat there as the minutes passed. Finally the nurse appeared at the door again and gestured for them to follow her. They stood hastily and followed her into the delivery room. It was dimmer than the waiting room, unlit except for a mounted lamp above Deb’s bed. She was sitting up against the pillows, dark blonde hair spilling from her bun onto her shoulders.

“Hey guys,” she said with a weak smile.

“Hey,” Ron said, trying to sound attentive even though his gaze had latched onto the bassinet on her right side, and the little bundle of white blankets inside it. “Where’s your sister?”

“She’s um… she went to the cafeteria, I think?” She yawned. “Sorry, ’m still a little loopy.”

“You really don’t need to apologize,” Joe said. “How you doing?”

“Good. Glad it’s over.” She reached out with one hand and rested it on the bassinet. “Little guy’s doing great. Eight pounds even,” she said around another yawn. “We had a nice chat and said our goodbyes and everything so.” She waved her hand. “Have at ’im.”

“Are you sure?” Ron asked. “You don’t want some more time?”

Beside him he could feel Joe tense. This was what they hadn’t talked about. Deb was a friend of a friend who had come to them when she realized she was pregnant just a few weeks after her boyfriend of six months had been killed in a car accident. She had always _said_ she didn’t want to have a child, wouldn’t have kept the pregnancy at all if she hadn’t happened to know for a fact that Tyler would have wanted it. But there had always been that thought in the backs of their minds, _sure, she says that now…_

“Nah,” she said shaking her head. “Right now I just really want to sleep. Besides, I don’t want to pretend—” She broke off suddenly, and for a second her eyes looked watery. “It is what it is. I asked the nurse to take you guys into the room next door—is that okay? It’s empty. I figured you could get some privacy and I could get some sleep.”

“That’s fine,” Ron said. He stepped closer to the bed and bent down to kiss her cheek. “Thank you,” he said quietly.

She smiled at him again, and hugged Joe, and settled back against the blankets. The nurse stepped up and began to wheel the bassinet out of the room, and Deb wiggled her fingers at it as it left.

The two men followed the nurse into the empty room next door. She lifted the baby out of the bassinet without even thinking about it, and Ron envied her confidence; at the moment he was trying to remember every time he had ever held a baby, ever seen one being held, because his arms felt like they were attached to someone else’s body and his heart was pounding like a booming drum.

“Okay, here we go,” the nurse said cheerfully. “Who’s up?”

Ron glanced at Joe, but he shook his head.

“You can go first,” he said. He looked pale, but Ron wasn’t about to challenge him on the offer, so he put that aside for now.

The nurse transferred the bundle of blankets to his arms and corrected his grip.

“There you go, Dad—you’re a natural. I’ll be at the station just around the corner if you need me.”

Joe thanked her. Ron was distracted.

The baby had started whining when they moved into the new room—thin, distressed noises hovering on the edge of full-blown crying. Hesitantly Ron rocked him back and forth, and the noises subsided into a quiet hiccup. The baby’s face was red and his eyes tightly closed; his miniscule hand just barely poked out of the blanket, fingers curled around the edge.

Six years ago, this moment wasn’t even on his radar, he thought. He had left the Army and just… drifted. He found a job he liked well enough, an apartment that suited him, he had a few friends, and that was all. Now and again a vague sense of something missing, the drive the Army had given him, that sense of purpose and belonging, but no idea of how to get it back. He remembered the first time he had met Joe—Chuck had invited a group of people over for Memorial Day weekend, but Ron hadn’t known anyone else there. He’d spent most of the time standing in a corner with a bottle of beer, silently observing everyone else, eavesdropping on conversations without feeling the need to join them. At one point Joe had approached him and tried to make conversation. Ron had been annoyed at that. Responded with private jokes and absurd non-sequiturs and, eventually, one-word answers.

“Okay, then,” Joe had said with sarcasm in his voice. “Good chat,” he had thrown over his shoulder as he walked away.

And from that, all of this. God.

“What’s the blessing?” he asked in a hoarse voice.

“Hm?”

“The blessing,” he repeated. “There’s got to be a blessing for this.”

“Oh, right, um.” Joe paused and cleared his throat. “I’ve got it. Baruch atah HaShem Elokeinu Melech haolam, hatov v’hameiteev. Blessed are you HaShem our god, ruler of the universe, who is good and does good.”

Ron repeated the words softly. _Who is good and does good_. He rocked his son in his arms again and said “You’re freaking out,” without looking up.

“I’m not—” Joe snapped, and then he stopped.

“Which is funny,” Ron continued. “Because remember when you brought up kids, I was the one to say ‘let’s wait’ and you said ‘no, let’s not wait, because I want nine’—”

“I didn’t say _nine_.”

“My point is, you were so excited.”

“I _am_ excited,” Joe insisted, even though his face was still pale when Ron looked up. “I just—I didn’t think—I didn’t think I’d be scared.”

Ron tried to keep his expression neutral, but his eyes widened. He’d never heard Joe admit that he was scared about anything. He avoided the word on principle, and in this quiet little room it seemed to linger. Ron sat on the bed and tilted his body towards Joe, adjusting his grip so Joe could see the baby’s face better.

“Nothing to be scared of,” he said in a light voice. “He’s twenty minutes old—I think you can take him.”

“What if we fuck up?” Joe asked. Ron shrugged.

“Try again with the other eight?” he offered.

“I’m serious.”

“Joe, look at this kid. We’re going to take him home, feed him, play with him, put him in a crib, and love the shit out of him. That’s all we need to do for the next six months. And the six months after that, we’ll deal with it when it comes.” Joe nodded, although he didn’t look convinced, and Ron brushed his index finger over the baby’s cheek. “We have to think of a name, too,” he added.

They had only had a few conversations about names, and all of them had trailed off without a conclusion.

“I’ve got nothing,” Joe shrugged.

“Come on, nothing?”

“Both my grandfathers are still alive, so we can’t use their names, and all the dead relatives I ever knew were women, so no help there.”

“Do we _have_ to name our kid after a dead person?”

“No, but the only other one I had planned on giving to my kid was David, because I’ve always liked that name, but if you want to go out and tell people that’s what we picked…”

Ron took a moment to imagine the reaction of their friends if he told them he had even inadvertently named their firstborn son after Webster, and shook his head.

“All right, all right. Give me a minute… what about Isaac?” he asked with a smile. Joe shrugged noncommittally, and then paused.

“Hang on—”

Ron snorted. When he had chosen his own Hebrew name, he had settled on Perez after I.L. Peretz, his favorite Yiddish writer; now he watched as Joe remembered what Peretz’s first name was, and he rolled his eyes.

“No, I’m not going to be the only one in this family without a Peretz-themed name.”

“Actually his middle name was Leib, so technically—”

“No, shut up, we’re not calling him Isaac.”

The baby was quiet; he looked like he had fallen asleep. Ron stared down at him and pursed his lips.

“Does it _have_ to be a Hebrew name?” he asked. “I’ve always kind of liked Owen.”

“That would just mean we have to decide on _two_ names,” Joe pointed out. “Three if we want to give him a middle name. No matter what, we have to pick a Hebrew name in time for the bris—fuck, we have to plan a bris.”

“Sorry, buddy,” Ron muttered. “But at least _you_ won’t remember it.” He thought for another minute. “There’s a thousand names in the Bible—maybe we should just go home, sleep for a few hours, open a chumash and see what pops up.”

“No,” Joe said, staring at the baby. “I don’t—we can’t leave him yet.”

“Got a point there.”

“So let’s… I don’t know, at least narrow it down.” Joe yawned.

“What time is it?” Ron asked suddenly. Joe checked his watch.

“Nine twenty-three.”

“After sunset. He was born on Shavuot; are there any Shavuot names?”

Joe thought for a moment.

“Nothing in Ruth…” he said slowly. “The only guy who shows up is Boaz and we’re not naming him Boaz. I guess—giving of the Torah, there’s always Moses and Aaron, those are classics.”

“Every Aaron I’ve ever met has been an asshole.”

“Yeah. And Moses—Moshe—I don’t know, it’s very Old Country.”

“I know what you mean,” Ron said with a small smile. “I’d be fine with Moshe as a Hebrew name, but I wouldn’t want to drop him off at the first day of school and say ‘this is Moses.’”

“Yeah,” Joe chuckled.

He looked suddenly distracted, and Ron didn’t have to ask why. First day of school. They hadn’t made real plans that far ahead. For months they had been focused on baby things, and sure, they knew their neighborhood and the schools and they had a vague idea of what the future would look like… but there was something different now, with the baby actually here. Plans felt real in a way they hadn’t before. He rubbed his thumb back and forth over the soft blanket, gazing down at the baby.

When he looked up, he saw Joe was staring too, and his heart began to ache. Joe had the same look on his face on their wedding day—fearful and adoring and so incredibly _open._  No defensiveness, no self-consciousness, nothing to hide. God, he loved this man.

“Joe,” Ron said softly. “Come hold your son.”

Joe swallowed.

“Okay.”

He stepped closer, so close the tips of their shoes touched, and breathlessly they transferred the baby from Ron’s arms to Joe’s. He realized, with a surge of amusement, that they would probably do this a thousand times during the next year alone, and that soon they would pass the baby back and forth without stopping to think about it, but this first time they were careful and nervous, and his hands hovered for a moment to make sure that Joe had a good grip.

“I’m gonna—sit,” Joe said hoarsely, and he sank into the chair by the bedside table. He took a deep breath and cradled the baby close. “Okay, I get it,” he said. “We can keep him.”

“I want a puppy, too,” Ron said, sinking into the chair next to him. He closed his eyes and rested his head on Joe’s shoulders. It seemed like it had been a week since the last time they slept.

“I think one dog and one baby is enough.”

“Spoilsport.”

They were silent for a few minutes, and then Joe said, “What do you think of Nathaniel?”

Ron considered it for a moment, and shifted his weight in his chair.

“I’m open to it. Where’d it come from?”

“I was thinking of Shavuot again. It’s not just the Book of Ruth, it’s also about the giving of the Torah, right? And going past just the story, there’s that bit from the blessing when you have an aliyah, baruch atah HaShem blah blah _natanlanu et Torato_ …”

“Who has given us the Torah,” Ron translated. “Natan-i-el, that’s ‘gift of God,’ then?”

“Gotta be.”

He opened his eyes and looked down at the baby lying peacefully in Joe’s arms.

“Nathaniel,” he said, testing it out. “Nathan.”

“Nate,” Joe suggested.

“Nataniel ben Yosef v’Peretz,” Ron suggested with a smile. He kissed Joe’s cheek. “I like it.”

“Me, too.” Joe lifted Nathan closer and bent his head down. “What do you think, buddy?” he cooed. Nathan stirred, little hiccuping sounds coming from his mouth, and Joe rocked him. He was grinning; he didn’t look petrified anymore. “Hey, Nate. How does that sound?”

The baby let out a small distressed cry, but he quieted when Joe touched his lips to his forehead, and turned closer to his body. Ron wrapped his arm around Joe’s shoulders and touched the bottom of Nathan’s blanket, holding his tiny foot through the fabric.

“This is my favorite holiday.”

**Author's Note:**

>  **HaShem** \- literally "the name." this is how some observant Jews refer to God in conversation in order to avoid using any of God's more official names, out of respect. it's not technically the right word to use in the blessing Joe recites, but I don't like using the real name in fic, so that's my go-around  
>  **naming a child after a dead relative** \- this is an Ashkenazi Jewish practice. it's a way of hoping that the baby will take on the good qualities of the deceased person, while also avoiding the possibility that, when the Angel of Death comes to take the older relative, it might get confused and steal away the baby instead  
>  **bris** \- literally "covenant," this word is used to denote the ritual and celebration of a Jewish boy's circumcision, which takes place on the eighth day of his life  
>  **aliyah** \- being called up to recite the blessings over the Torah when it's read out loud in the synagogue  
>  **Hebrew names** \- a ritual Hebrew name is used when a Jew is called up to the Torah, on their wedding contract, and on other ritual occasions. the traditional format is [Name] ben/bat (son of/daughter of) [father], but nowadays many people include the names of both parents. v' is "and." It doesn't technically have to be Hebrew, but most Jews prefer to have a Jewish-language name for their ritual name, whether it Hebrew, Yiddish, Judeo-Spanish, Judeo-Arabic, etc.


End file.
